macOS command-line tools you might not know about

`pbcopy` and `pbpaste` are one of my most-loved in the list.

Dealing with some minified json, switching to iTerm, doing `pbpaste | json_pp | pbcopy` and having a clean output is _so_ nice.

If I had a nickel for each `cat foo.json | jq | pbcopy`, I'd be a rich man :)

That's a useless use of cat. You can use `jq . foo.json | pbcopy` or `jq < foo.json | pbcopy`.

Speaking for myself, the first form is more natural- even if it’s a useless cat, because I’m always cat-ing files to see their structure. Then progressively tacking on different transforms. And then finally putting it in whatever I want as output.

It’s so ingrained, I’m more likely than not to just write it out that way even when I know exactly what I’m doing from the onset.

Yes, this iterative procedure is often why "useless" cats get put into it. It's a very effective way of processing regular text information.

e.g.

I need to grab some info from textfile.txt to use as arguments to a function.

cat textfile.txt

looks like its comma delimited.

cat textfile.txt | cut -d, -f 2-5

ah, its the third and fourth column i need

cat textfile.txt | cut -d, -f 3-4 | grep '123456'

perfect

cat textfile.txt | cut -d, -f 3-4 | grep 123456 | tr , ' '

myfunc $(cat textfile.txt | cut -d, -f 3-4 | grep 123456 | tr , ' ')

> cat textfile.txt

> looks like its comma delimited.

Interesting; why wouldn't you use `head`? Who knows how big textfile.txt is?

`file` will tell you too